Right now the issue of “immigration,” legal and illegal, has become once again a political football being tossed back and forth between the left and the right. There is controversy over the idea of “sanctuary cities, or cities where people who are illegally in the US can legally “hide” from prosecution.
As I have explained before, the issue has nothing to do with immigration, but is a political football being tossed between two parties largely as a distraction, and if any results come from this, it will be the general erosion of rights for all people, especially for the citizens.
In an interesting development coming from Florida, in what some are calling a “landmark” ruling, Miami district courts have ruled that municipal authorities must cooperate with ICE or lose their jobs. This comes in response to a new Florida state law that put a ban on sanctuary cities.
Miami U.S. District Court Judge Beth Bloom upheld a majority of the components of that law on Monday, just one day before SB 168 went into effect.
On top of banning sanctuary cities in Florida, it also creates a new mandate. It requires police departments to hold inmates for an additional 48 hours to give ICE enough time to take custody of them.
There was only one part of the new law that Bloom shot down.
It was a piece of the law which required officers to transport illegal aliens across state lines if requested to do so by federal agencies. According to Bloom, that’s the federal government’s responsibility.
Back in June, SB 168 was signed into law by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Although it formally went into effect in July, it wasn’t set to be enforced until Tuesday.
And there’s good incentive for elected officials to comply with the law. If they don’t, they could be removed from office by the governor or state attorney general. (source)
As expected, there were many people who opposed the legislation on the basis that some of the wording was too vague to enforce, such as a requirement that officers make their “best efforts” to assist ICE, something that lawyers and police said completely subjective and effectively removed control of the local police reporting to their superiors and replaced it with the federal government. Likewise, there is concern as to the degree of “compliance” expected of officers from ICE, which was not specified, and having noted this could result in an officer being put into a legally perilous situation but still being forced to “comply” lest he potentially lose his job.
For years in the US, there has been a concern over the “Federalization” of the police, where having transitioned from “peace officers” to “law enforcement officers,” the community barriers that traditionally existed in the US as a part of the natural governing hierarchy were being destroyed and replaced with a direct top-down system where local authorities were increasingly having to answer directly to federal bureaucracies and at times, being given conflicting orders.
The idea of “enforcing the law” sounds good, and laws should be enforced, but this is not about “enforcing the laws,” as the laws already exist to do this. Rather, this is about political control and justifying federal presence in local affairs.
The US has many problems right now, and due to the decline in morality, major demographic and political changes, the nature of what it means to be an “American” is changing, and the laws are starting to reflect this. It is why gun culture is dying out, not for organic reasons, but because guns require a level of collective social responsibility that has been under attack for over a half-century with no end in sight. Laws are a reflection of the people, and if a people choose to live irresponsibly or support irresponsible policies and ideas, then the laws will change to reflect their irresponsibility. This is what we are seeing today.
This is likewise not to say that there are not individual people or groups who are not responsible for aggravating conditions to the point they are and then seeking to profit from them. This is a reality that must not be denied. However, one must agree to their ideas and plans in some way in order for them to be implemented.
In the USSR, it was not uncommon for the local police to be forced into uncomfortable and disordered working relationships with the “apparatchiki” in government. This is the same in China today, where people in the high ranks of government nearly provide direct supervision to the common people and common law enforcement, which only results in the establishment of a repressive system.
These patterns are not culturally or ethnically specific, but are potentials in all societies. Having noted this, the fact that the US is following in this way is a grave danger to her, as she is rapidly becoming, and in many ways has already become the very thing that she criticizes other people for, but just in a way that appears to be more culturally and socially acceptable.
The issue is not immigration. It never was immigration. It was always power, and about using immigration to take the freedoms away from the average citizen. This is but merely an extension of previous political thought processes and forms, and it does not matter if a Republican or Democrat is elected president, because these patterns will continue to unfold.